Storage management generally concerns managing data on storage media, such as tape and disk devices. Data on a storage medium, such as a tape, may be lost (e.g., either while at a disaster recovery site or in-transit from one data center to another). While tapes have commonly been lost when in transit or misplaced and misfiled at disaster recovery sites, recent change in laws requires public disclosure when the lost data might be related to individual financial or medical information. These public disclosure requirements have forced many companies to attempt to better protect all data that is not stored in the secure data center.
Certain products, such as backup products for example, have started to address encryption. However, with these products, the encryption of data (and its later decryption for reading) is interdependent upon the application being used to encrypt the data.
Certain products allow data to be copied from tape (or disk) to another tape in an encrypted form. So, if a simple application writes a two-volume tape file; then this application can copy that file (or files) to another two-volume tape file in an encrypted form. Then, to read the data, the encrypted two-volume tape file would have to be re-copied and un-encrypted back onto a two-volume tape file that is not encrypted. Then, the application could read the un-encrypted two-volume tape file as input. This means writing the data twice and reading the data twice and keeping track of the file name and relationship between the original data, the encrypted copy, and the un-encrypted copy.